The NASA-funded Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure (SIIOS) performed well in seismic experiments conducted in snowy summer Greenland, according to a new study by the SIIOS team led by the University of Arizona published this week in Seismological Research Letters.
The NASA-funded Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure (SIIOS) performed well in seismic experiments conducted in snowy summer Greenland, according to a new study by the SIIOS team led by the University of Arizona published this week in Seismological Research Letters.
SIIOS could be a part of proposed NASA spacecraft missions to the surface of Europa or Enceladus. These moons of Jupiter and Saturn are encrusted by an icy shell over subsurface liquid oceans, and seismic data could be used to better define the thickness and depth of these layers. Other seismic points of interest on these worlds could include ice volcanoes, drainage events below the ice shell and possibly even a timely glimpse of the reverberations from a meteorite impact.
To better mimic mission conditions, the SIIOS team attached flight candidate seismometers to the platform and legs of a buried and aluminum-shielded mock spacecraft lander on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Angela Marusiak of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and colleagues found that the lander’s recordings of seismic waves from passive and active seismic sources were comparable to recordings made by other ground seismometers and geophones up to a kilometer away.
Although the attached seismometers did pick up some of the shaking of the lander itself, Marusiak said the lander and ground-based seismometers “performed very similar to each other, which is definitely promising,” in detecting earthquakes and ice cracking.
Read more at Seismological Society of America
Photo Credit: Lurens via Pixabay
